M Metin Basbay On Free Trade And All That
In his article, Is A Potential Trade War An Opportunity For Developing Countries?, in TRT World, M Metin Basbay argues how the rules of the international trade, i.e., free trade favours the developed world and that the rising trade war gives developing countries a chance to “better maneuver their political agendas”.
He quotes Ha-Joon Chang to make his point:
In a globalised world, newly emerging (infant) industries have to compete with century-old industrial giants, and more often than not, are crushed before they can even develop the capacity in terms of human capital and know-how for high technology sectors – and reduce the per-item cost associated with large scale initial investments.
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Cambridge Economist Ha-Joon Chang argued that the infant industries hypothesis is still relevant in the modern context. In his influential book Kicking Away the Ladder, he argued that developed nations force liberalised trade and globalisation upon less developed nations so that they can enjoy both the cheap labour force and the larger market of developing countries. By doing so, they deprive these nations of political instruments like trade protections which they themselves had the luxury of using while in their own infant-state era.